The present invention relates to a transmitter portion of a portable electronic communication device and is concerned with reducing wind-noise produced by an undesired air stream blowing into a microphone.
Conventionally, several types of so-called “non-directional microphones” have been used in transmitters provided in portable electronic communication devices such as cellular phones. However, although these microphones are considered to be less sensitive to wind-noise from air blowing into the microphone compared to so-called “directional microphones”, wind-noise is often still a problem. Therefore, noise cancelling algorithms are sometimes used to reduce this problem. However, a drawback is that due to power consumption, noise cancelling algorithms are not always suitable in portable electronic devices having limited battery capacity.
Moreover, non-directional microphones also suffer from low signal to ambient ratio, whereby noise or background sound can negatively influence voice. Therefore, there is also a need to improve this, for instance by using a directional microphone, which has a better signal to ambient ratio compared to a non-directional microphone. However, since a directional microphone is sensitive to wind noise, to be able to use the advantage compared to a non-directional microphone, wind noise sensitivity needs to be reduced. Due to large power consumption noise cancelling algorithms are not suitable in portable devices as described above. Because of that, non-directional microphones have not found wide-spread application among portable electronic devices of today.
Thus, there is a need of a microphone, in particular a directional microphone, for a portable electronic device having low power consumption, good signal to ambient ratio, and being resistant to wind noise.